The role of recent versus future events in children’s comprehension of referentially ambiguous sentences: Evidence from eye tracking

Lu Zhang, CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

Lily Kornbluth, CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

Pia Knoeferle, CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

Abstract

Findings from recent eye-tracking studies suggest that adults
prefer to rely more on recently seen events than possible future events during
sentence comprehension: When the verb in an NP1-VERB-ADV-NP2 sentence was
referentially ambiguous between a recent action and an equally possible future
action, adults fixated the target of the recent action more often than the
not-yet-acted upon object (Knoeferle & Crocker, 2007; Knoeferle, Carminati,
Abashidze, & Essig, 2011). We examined whether this preference for the recent
event generalizes to five-year-old children. In an eye-tracking study,
five-year-olds were presented a display with an animal and two other objects. On
the next picture frame, the animal was depicted as performing an action (e.g., a
horse galloped to a blue barn). Next, a spoken sentence referred either to an
event involving the acted upon target object (the blue barn) or to an equally
plausible future action event (e.g. galloping to the red barn). At the adverb in
NP1-VERB-ADV-PP sentences, children fixated more often the recent (vs. future)
event target. This result replicates the findings from the adult studies and
suggests that, just like adults, children rely more on the recent event than
expectations of an event that could happen next. At the same time, visual context
effects of the recent events were subtly delayed for children (vs. adults). For
adults, the recent-event preference emerged during the verb; for children, by
contrast, it emerged post-verbally during the adverb. Thus, similar attentional
mechanisms underlie visual context effects in both 5-year old children and adults
but their time course differs.